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Nat Hentoff

Nathan Irving "Nat" Hentoff (June 10, 1925 – January 7, 2017) was an American historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic, and syndicated columnist for United Media. Hentoff was a columnist for The Village Voice from 1958 to 2009.[1] Following his departure from The Village Voice, Hentoff became a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, continued writing his music column for The Wall Street Journal, which published his works until his death. He often wrote on First Amendment issues, vigorously defending the freedom of the press.

Hentoff began his career in broadcast journalism while also hosting a weekly jazz program on Boston radio station WMEX[13]. In the 1940s, he hosted two radio shows on WMEX: JazzAlbum and From Bach To Bartók.[14] He continued to present a jazz program on WMEX into the early 1950s, and during that period was an announcer on the program Evolution of Jazz on WGBH-FM. By the late 1950s, he was co-hosting the program The Scope of Jazz on WBAI-FM in New York City.[15] He went on to write many books on jazz and politics.[3]

In 1952, Hentoff joined Down Beat magazine as a columnist,[16] and from 1953 through 1957, he was an associate editor.[9][17] He was fired in 1957 allegedly for trying to hire an African-American writer.[13][18]

In 2013, a biographical film about Hentoff, entitled The Pleasures of Being Out of Step explored his career in jazz and as a First Amendment advocate. The independent documentary, produced and directed by David L. Lewis,[26] won the Grand Jury prize in the Metropolis competition at the DOC NYC festival[27] and played in theaters across the country.[3]

Hentoff espoused generally liberal views on domestic policy and civil liberties, but in the 1980s, he began articulating more socially conservative positions—opposition to abortion, voluntary euthanasia, and the selective medical treatment of severely disabled infants.[28] Hentoff argued that a consistent life ethic should be the viewpoint of a genuine civil libertarian, arguing that all human rights are at risk when the rights of any one group of people are diminished, that human rights are interconnected, and people deny others' human rights at their peril.[28]

Hentoff was a believer in the persistence of anti-semitism[33] and a supporter of the existence of the state of Israel. Yet, he often criticized Israeli policies, both on issues of domestic freedoms, such as the absence of due process for Palestinians,[34] and on issues of foreign policy, such as the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. His opposition to Israel's invasion of Lebanon led three rabbis to symbolically excommunicate Hentoff from the religion of Judaism.[35] He commented, "I would have told them about my life as a heretic, a tradition I keep precisely because I am a Jew.”[35]

An ardent critic of the G. W. Bush administration's expansion of presidential power, in 2008 Hentoff called for the new president to deal with the "noxious residue of the Bush-Cheney war against terrorism". According to Hentoff, among the casualties of that "war" have been "survivors, if they can be found, of CIA secret prisons ('black sites'); victims of CIA kidnapping renditions; and American citizens locked up indefinitely as 'unlawful enemy combatants'".[37] He advocated the formal prosecution in court of members of the Bush administration, such as lawyer John Yoo, for war crimes.[38]

In a May 2014 column, titled "My Pro-Constitution Choice for President", Hentoff voiced his support for Kentucky Senator Rand Paul's potential 2016 run for president. He cited Paul's support for civil liberties, particularly his stand against the indefinite detention clauses in the National Defense Authorization Act as well as his opposition to the Obama administration's use of drones against American citizens.[40] Hentoff later rescinded his endorsement of Paul in light of the senator's support for normalizing relations with Cuba and his failure to support the complete annulment of the Patriot Act.[41]

Hentoff grew up attending an Orthodoxsynagogue in Boston. He recalled that as a youth, he would travel around the city with his father during the High Holidays to listen to various cantors and compare notes on their performances. He said cantors made "sacred texts compellingly clear to the heart," and he collected their recordings.[48] In later life, Hentoff was an atheist,[49][29] and has sardonically described himself as "a member of the Proud and Ancient Order of Stiff-Necked Jewish Atheists".[50][51] He expressed sympathy for Israel's Peace Now movement.[52]

Hentoff married three times, first to Miriam Sargent in 1950; the marriage was childless and the couple divorced that same year.[53] His second wife was Trudi Bernstein, whom he married on September 2, 1954, and with whom he had two children, Miranda and Jessica.[53] He divorced his second wife in August 1959.[53] On August 15, 1959, he married his third wife, Margot Goodman, with whom he had two children: Nicholas and Thomas.[53] The couple remained together until he died of natural causes at his Manhattan apartment on January 7, 2017.[6]

^Swain, Carol (2003). Contemporary voices of white nationalism in America. Cambridge, UK New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 83. ISBN978-0-521-01693-3. Note: this quote is from the authors' introductory essay, not from the interviews.

^"As I've said before, if a loudspeaker goes off and a voice says, 'All Jews gather in Times Square,' it could never surprise me." Amy Wilentz, in "How the War Came Home", New York, February 2012, quoting from a Nat Hentoff column in The Village Voice